


The Long Way 'Round

by GallifreyGod



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Minor Character Death, Romance, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22485262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GallifreyGod/pseuds/GallifreyGod
Summary: "You know that'll kill you, right?" a voice said from beside him. The voice only had a tinge of familiarity, but he'd be able to spot it in a crowd of a million people. He knew the soul behind the voice. From his peripheral vision, he was reacquainted with those bright blue eyes that didn't look too broken anymore."You're not real," he mumbled. "I'm sleep deprived and you're dead."
Relationships: John Munch/Amy Solwey
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	The Long Way 'Round

**Author's Note:**

> wow... me? writing something svu-based that isn't bensler? wow. just wow. I doubt anyone is gonna read this because lets be real honest right here, right now, i'm a loner in this ship. but if you are reading this, congratulations, you've stumbled upon my angst loving ass.

Desk lights blurred out from the squad room as he glanced around, moving in what felt like ultra-slow motion. 23 hours it had taken to just barely beat a confession out of the scum of the Earth; or in this case, Manhattan. The details didn't matter, justice would be served, and sleep would finally be bountiful. 

He watched carefully as Elliot hauled away the prisoner who may or may not have had a few cuts and bruises that he hadn't come in with. Olivia was hunched over her desk, fighting like hell to stay awake while nearly falling face-first into a cup of coffee. Fin was sitting with his feet up against his desk, scrubbing the barrel of his gun with a bristle brush. 

The hype had died down, except for him. He could still feel his heartbeat beating violently in his ribs. He knew he had gotten too hot in there, anger raging from every cell in his body. Everybody had a case that got under their skin, this one was just one of those cases. Cragen and Huang had both gripped tightly on his shoulders as he had continued to slam the perp up against the concrete walls. 

Too attached. Too emotional. 

His cases were becoming harder and harder to detach himself from. He wasn't as good as playing it close to the vest, time had withered that ability away. Now, he was left to stand in the ruins of the case that had been on everyone's mind for two weeks straight. It was over, but a pain ached in his chest at the thought. 

The sound of the phone hitting the cradle echoed out of Cragen's office, but Munch just stood in the center of the room. Dead to the world. The crime scene photos had replaced the inside of his eyelids, showing him a gruesome horror every time he blinked. That was just part of the job. 

"John, can you step in here please?" he heard the call for him from the man who stood solemnly in the doorway. He forced himself to snap back to reality; to put one foot in front of the other no matter how hard it was to keep himself grounded.

Carefully, he shut the door behind him and instantly begun concocting an apology for nearly killing the prisoner. "I'm sorry, Captain. I got too riled up, it won't happen again."

Cragen took a deep breath, his widened brown eyes staring his detective down. "John, take a seat please."

Munch furrowed his brows, cocking his head in confusion. He braced the handles on the chairs adjacent to the desk, sitting down carefully to listen to what his superior had to say. "Am I in trouble?" he asked, sounding nearly like a child who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Cragen took another deep breath, shaking his head as he did so. John could tell just by the way the man stood that he was trying to force himself to say something. Anything. But the words, they just wouldn't come out without a fight. "John, I just got off the phone with Hospice care. Amy Solwey passed away a short while ago. Her body couldn't handle the dialysis anymore. I thought you'd wanna know. I'm so sorry."

Just like that, the blurriness came back and the tunnel vision set in. The deep breath he involuntarily took in made his chest lurch, rising like a wave and washing over him. "No," he heard himself whisper softly. _No._ A simple word, yet a complicated antonym for what the world had just handed him.

* * *

It was a habit he had picked up in the eighties. A bad habit, nonetheless. Just like Cragen always kept a bottle of booze in his desk next to his AA chips, Munch kept a stale pack of menthol lights in his. The only difference was that the Captain never went back to his vice. John did. On days like this, John did. There he sat, on the roof of the 16th precinct with his legs dangling over the edge and a cigarette in his hand. The city lights of the deep night blurred in his eyes as he watched.

He just watched. Cars overcrowding the one-way streets. Fumes from taxis rose from the exhaust pipes, dissipating as soon as they reached the higher atmosphere. 

He liked to watch the city as it never slept.

He had shared his wounds with Amy. Only Amy. Something in those broken blue eyes of hers had told him that she needed to hear his pain. She once fixated on pain, but his pain was different. By proxy. He wasn't the one who held the gun to his head, it was his father. Finally, she heard the story from another side. He'd never forget the apology she had mumbled through her tears as her hand clenched his. Then, her life became about saving people.

She never was the most conventional person. He liked that, even when he knew he shouldn't.

The lights over the city continued to sparkle as the blue-hued smoke rose from his fingertips. He took another deep inhale from the filter, allowing the nicotine buzz overrule the faint heartache. The heartache, he knew it was hiding behind a thin layer of shock. The first stage of grief that he knew oh so well. It was waiting for him to feel it once again, the shock. 

"You know that'll kill you, right?" a voice said from beside him. The voice only had a tinge of familiarity, but he'd be able to spot it in a crowd of a million people. He knew the soul behind the voice. From his peripheral vision, he was reacquainted with those bright blue eyes that didn't look too broken anymore. 

"You're not real," he mumbled. "I'm sleep deprived and you're dead." 

"That may be so... but I'm not going to talk to you until you throw the cigarette over the edge of the building." she smiled, lolling her head to the side as if she were trying to get him to look at her. 

He was scared to look at her. Scared that maybe if he did dare to turn his head, she'd float away like smoke too. But despite his greater wishes to numb the pain with nicotine, he smudged the ash along the cement wall and threw the cigarette down onto the street. 

"You're a figment of my imagination," he whispered, slowly turning to face her. He had never seen her quite like this before; cheeks with color and a smile that didn't come with the burden of hiding pain. She looked more alive than she ever did when she was actually alive. "Amy," 

"Hi, John," she spoke through her smile and sparkling eyes. Her voice was different, but still held the heart of the meaning behind the words she once said. The difference was that now, she could hear herself. 

In that moment, he wondered if she knew just how beautiful her voice truly was. 

"You can hear me now, huh?" he asked cautiously, earning a soft and slow nod in return. "This is really it. You're really gone..." he fought back tears, even knowing full well that he was talking to a mirage. An exhaustion fueled image brought on by the grief he had been waiting to experience. If anyone were to see, they'd see only a heartbroken man sitting on the ledge of a building while watching the city. 

"I'm not gone. Not really," she tilted her head, looking over the city with him. "I know this may seem like a pointless sentiment, John, but you changed my life. You did that, _you._ "In that moment, looking down, he swore he could feel the hand that she was laying on top of his. The same soft skin that had been bruised by endless needles, the hand he held as he unlaid his deepest regrets. "That part of me will never die because you're still here. It's cheesy, but I guess as long as you're alive, a part of me will be too... with you." 

"It's not fair," he sniffled, pulling his glasses off of his face and setting them beside himself. "None of this is fair, you deserved a longer life. A better life," he said, a tear or two falling down the bridge of his nose.

"John... I did some questionable things back then; some of which I still stand by. I believed in the right to be able to end your own life. I also believed in giving other people a chance. But I would've never been able to cross the bridge from one to another, to turn from ending lives to trying to save lives if it weren't for you." she tried to squeeze his hand tighter and maybe it was the lack of sleep but he could actually feel the soft ridges of her fingerprints on his skin.

"You always had it in you, even before me," he said.

"Before you and I met, I was an embryologist, remember? I helped create lives. At the time, I was trying to provide comfort for lives that were filled with emotional pain that they wanted to end. After that, I was trying to save lives instead, even though it was illegal. When you strip away the logistics of all of that, the methods and the way I went about it, it comes down to the principle of it all. A principle that I know you believe in too; helping create lives, helping comfort lives, and helping save lives." he finally looked back over in her direction, seeing the prideful glow in her smile and her softening eyes. "Now, that gets to live on through you because you get to live with me in your heart. The only difference is, you don't have to feel guilty about the methods. You get to bask in the end result; life. Pure life. That's the gift I can give to you since your gift to me was giving me my life back. My purpose living through you. _Lives_ that get to live through you." 

He wiped away the stray tears with the back of his sleeve while the sound of sirens and honking horns emitted from stories below them. "I'm sorry I didn't get to visit you more often... I guess I was just scared. Hospice is... strange, I guess. Walking into a building where you know people are meant to die. It was too hard to do frequently but I regret that now. I'm always gonna regret that."

"Hey," she smiled again, her own bout of tears falling delicately down her cheekbones. "Don't bully yourself over this. I didn't want you to see me that way. And besides, I wasn't really there anyway. The last few days... I just slept a lot. It was a whole lot of morphine alarms singing out of tune and the doctors trying to decipher whether or not I was in a coma. I was awake, they just didn't know it. It would've hurt to know you saw me like that and that I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it other than lie there and struggle with being powerless. You visited when I was still awake and part of the world, that means more to me than you being there as I died."

"Still," he exhaled. "I should've been there. You shouldn't have been alone." he knew what he was trying to say, and why he couldn't say it. He should've been at her bedside, holding her hand to remind her once again that she wasn't alone. 

"I'm not alone now. Neither are you," she added, her newfound voice rising to sound more upbeat. "Y'know, John... I don't think you give yourself enough credit for what you've done for me."

"What do you mean?" he asked, daring to stare at her again. Each moment that passed she became more beautiful than the last. She wasn't in pain, she wasn't suffering. She was just, well... _existing_. 

"When you and I first met, I felt like my sole purpose was to try to help those hurting to pass over painlessly. By proxy, I guess, that was my way of doing the same to myself. It was always a plan for me, despite what I said about my blog giving me purpose. I always thought that someday, the pain would be too much and I'd throw in the towel."

The invisible hand that held his started to hold on tighter.

"But I didn't, John. Because of you, I made it to the end. Not just my ending, but the proper ending that the universe had in store for me. Because of you, I survived until it just wasn't my time to survive anymore. Don't you realize it yet? You talked me out of it without even knowing. The night you talked to me about your father, you showed me, _a total stranger,_ your biggest vulnerability. You didn't guilt me or try to scare me... you had no reason to open up to me other than the fact that you deemed me worthy enough to be the one who got to listen to you. There wasn't a single person in the world who could ever change my views on my choices. Somehow, you managed to do just that. Do you think I would've actually decided to live much longer after that if those views weren't changed? Probably not."

He chuckled dryly, his heart hammering at the look of her mischevious smile. He wanted to touch her, to reach out and hug her but the voice in his head told him not to. She would disintegrate if he did, he wasn't ready to say goodbye. Not yet. Maybe not ever. 

"So... this means you're not in pain anymore, right?" he asked carefully, trying not to make a single wrong move that would disrupt the delicate image beside himself. Somewhere in the exhaustion, he was able to convince himself that it wasn't all just a dream. He was opening up his heart to a ghost, forgoing the barrier around himself that would only be there if he knew it was all just a hallucination. 

"Only love. No pain, no suffering. Only love and freedom. Although, as awful as the pain was, I'm glad I spent as much time on Earth as I did. Not a second more, not a second less."

His chest released some of the constriction once her calming words hit his ears. That was always in the back of his mind, playing around in his subconscious as a self-torture method; wondering if she was in pain. Right down to the very moment, whether it be during a street chase of lying awake at night as the red numbers on his alarm clock fed into the darkness: was Amy in pain? At that moment, was she hurting?

No longer.

She watched as his head hung lower, his fingernails scratching anxiously at the coarse texture of the cement. 

"John," she whispered. "Do you remember Doctor Audrey Jackson? She came in and did evaluations back in 1999?" he nodded silently as an answer. "She said to you, _'You've given up on relationships, but you still believe in true love and the pain of never having found it is unbearable.'_ " 

He didn't answer this time, his head only drooped lower as the words washed over him. 

"Look at me," she whispered again. It wasn't an order, but an encouragement as she saw him slipping further into his grief. As he slowly lifted his head, he saw the lights of the skyline reflect off of her already twinkling eyes. God, how could someone possibly be so damn beautiful? A smile that had seen years of endless pain and still, it made his heart skip a beat. 

The answer was written all over her face. Right there, on the ledge hanging over the city, she was telling him as an expert of pain that he didn't need to feel it anymore. He didn't need to drown in the unbearable for a moment longer. 

"You found me," This time, she signed the words as she spoke them. Her fingers moved in the intricate patterns they had formed into for years. It was as if she knew that somehow, if she used her native language, he'd understand her words on the level she wished he'd feel them on. 

Wherever she truly was, she was telling him to lay that pain to rest because if anybody could see the truth for what it was and where it was, it was her. It would always be her; passed over into a life of the all-knowing. The truest of intelligence and understanding. 

That pain, it doesn't need to be unbearable anymore. He'd found her.

If he weren't so tired, he would sit and ask himself which pain was worse; never having found true love, or finding it and losing it. But he didn't bother himself with that never-ending question. Some day, worlds away, it wouldn't matter. 

"I found in you what you hadn't realized you'd found in me," she said, her words much more complex than the simple admission of love that she was trying to say. 

She loved him. 

He loved her. 

The feeling of her hand on his growing stronger. He pushed away the thoughts that told him she wasn't really there, and instead allowed himself to feel what he was meant to feel. It would soon disappear and he'd later regret it if he didn't just allow himself to accept the feeling of her skin resting against his. 

When his eyes finally met hers without the bashfulness that had been covering his previous glances, he could've sworn he was staring directly into her soul. Finally, she was undamaged. The truth of her being was no longer haunted by chronic pain and wrong decisions. She simply existed, which was all she had ever wanted. 

"I love you too," he said, the breath being ripped straight from his lungs. She didn't need to say it, she would never need to say it. He knew simply from the fact that what he was feeling was too strong to ever be unrequited.

Her smile met her eyes; something that had never happened when he had seen her alive. It was a sight to be forever seared into his memory. Maybe even a sight that would get him through the rest of his days. 

"I'll see you, John. I'll always be here, but you'll see me again. Not too soon, but not too late either. When the time is right, I promise. I'll see you again." her hand lifted away from his, signing a familiar movement he recognized as _'I love you,'_ It didn't need to be said in words. In fact, he preferred it in sign. At least then, it would be easier to remember witnessing it instead of only hearing it. Her image wouldn't fade with time.

She was saying goodbye and he knew it was time to do so himself. Undoubtedly, it would also be the hardest goodbye he'd ever have to say. "Till then, I guess we'll have to go the long way 'round?" he asked, one of a million more stray tears falling down the aged skin on his face.

"The long way 'round," she confirmed with one last smile. In a split second, he felt the ghostly touch of her lips gently pressing against his cheek. He hadn't even realized that his eyes had closed until they opened and he was once again by himself as he looked over the city that never slept.

The long way 'round, indeed.


End file.
